Recently, image compression standards such as JPEG2000/JPIP (See e.g. David Taubman's implementation of Kakadu, available on the Kakadu software web site: www.kakadusoftware.com) have been introduced to meet a demanding engineering goal: to enable very large images (i.e. giga-pixels in size) to be delivered incrementally or selectively from a server to a client over a low-bandwidth communication channel. When such images are being viewed at full resolution, only a limited region can fit on a client's graphical display at any given time; the new standards are geared toward selectively accessing such regions and only sending across the communication channel data that is relevant to the region. If this “region of interest” or ROI changes continuously, then a continuous dialogue between a client and server over a low-bandwidth channel can continue to keep the client's representation of the area inside the ROI accurate. Prior technologies are typically limited to the incremental and selective transmission of discretely sampled images. The present invention extends this representation and transmission model to include vector data, hyperlinks, and other spatially localized features.